We Must Do Something, Even If It Makes Matters Much Worse

And that is why our war in the Middle East is going to start all over again.

I’ve given Obama a lot of credit for his seeming reluctance to involve the US in military conflicts. A McCain or Romney administration, I’m sure, would have had boots on the ground by this point. But the Liberal Interventionists in the administration, such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power, so traumatized by the failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide and as helplessly compelled to view all conflict through the lens of that failure as the previous administration was compelled to view all conflict through the lens of the success of the Cold War, and operating under the doctrine the UN now calls “Responsibility to Protect” but which was once known as the White Man’s Burden, seem to have made a winning case for dipping a toe into the tar pit.

Now that we’ve determined (to “a high level of confidence”) that Bashar al-Assad has used sarin gas several times over the past year, we’re going to fix it by handing out guns to the “moderate” rebels. It’s a slam dunk. I wonder, if we offered chemical weapons to the rebels, whether they would use them. I suspect they would.

Rebel General Idris: “Give me 200 antitank missiles, 100 antiaircraft weapons, and half a million bullets so that the killing can stop.”

Now that we’ve selected our proxy (an incoherent faction within an even more incoherent faction), it will be that much more difficult to resist the pressure of calls for escalation when half-measures inevitably fail. Those half-measures will turn into full-measures, and the civil war that perhaps Assad could have cruelly won will be invigorated now that his opposition has a high level of confidence in US support. We will prolong the suffering and provide a whole new set of motivations for men to kill other men in the region.

In “Nonviolence and Peacemaking Today” (1997), an essay in which Michael Nagler endeavored to establish the concept of peace as an activity and not merely as the absence of an activity, “violence is [defined as] a failure to perceive the living web of unity that binds attacker and victim.” Violence, more than the application of brute force, is a form of blindness. What can restore our sight?

Driving Without Ego

It’s no secret how much ego American’s invest in their cars. In more than just a marketing, self-commodifying, status-seeking sense, our cars (or bicycles, or even our bus routes) are an extension of ourselves. How could our motility in whatever form not have an effect on how we view ourselves interacting with the social world?

My experience of driving is still limited. I’ve had a license for only about 14 years, and for a not insignificant amount of that time I lived an urban, no-drive lifestyle. But I’ve also driven the long way around the USA, from Philadelphia to Vancouver to San Diego to Houston and back, a trip of several thousand miles. I’ve taken numerous other long distance trips. So far I’ve gotten 1 speeding ticket and caused 1 collision (property damage only, no injuries, I’m fortunate). And lately I’ve been delivering Chinese food part time, which has proven to be a somewhat novel experience. I also love to drive.

For a while now, I’ve also been interested in the ways that we live our ethics. Philosophy sometimes has this appearance of being a leisure-time pursuit, a thing somehow outside of the various practices of everyday life…outside of sleeping, eating, working, watching tv, etc. But just a little reflection can usually belie that appearance. When we eat meat or abstain, when we do our duty or follow our heart, when we stare at the boob-tube or attend the cinema, we are living the ideas we have about our place and conduct in the world. Even when we’re just reading philosophy, we’re living philosophy.

And driving style is like this also.

Sometimes it can seem really cut-throat out there on the road amidst the traffic. And we might make of that a kind of metaphor for the world. That the world is cut-throat, a “rat race,” each of us paddling our separate canoes, trying to make our way in spite of everyone else. What I’m saying, I guess, is that while driving can be a metaphor for the larger world it also is the larger world.

And I’ve been thinking lately about how my own driving style could both reflect and embody a more ethical practice of life. It boils down to 3 general behaviors: be aware, be generous, and drive without emotion.

BE AWARE

• I think it’s generally true that if you think you’re a good driver, then you’re not. A good driver is one who always strives to be good, not one who rests satisfied in the knowledge that they are good. A proud driver is a complacent driver.
• Unchain yourself from that pride in your skill by being aware of the limits of your control. Can your skill prevent another driver from having a heart attack and swerving across your lane? Can your skill ensure that the transmission of the car ahead of you does not suddenly slip or freeze? A person can’t even claim to control their own body except in limited ways, so much of it runs automatically without our conscious input. Remember that and be humble.
• But what you can control makes you responsible for the safety all of the drivers, bicyclists, pedestrians and property within your range of action. Behind the wheel, you vastly expand your potential for harm and destruction. Any time you’re driving, a split-second of inattention could make you a paralyzer or a murderer. You must protect others from yourself.
• While you can’t prevent other drivers from acting like fools, you’d be a fool yourself not to make allowances for them. Speaking of which…

BE GENEROUS

• The road does not belong to you alone, so don’t think you have the right to feel abused when someone cuts you off. The difference between them taking the road and you giving the road is only a question of attitude. Be generous and give the road freely.
• Let other drivers be your guests, not your enemies, even when they are rude.
• Give the driver in front of you room to brake as you would wish your guests to be comfortable.
• Give other drivers room to merge as you would open your front door to a friend.
• Give other drivers the ability to predict your behavior with efficient and effective use of turn signals. Drive with deliberate and clear intent, so as not to put other drivers on edge.

DRIVE WITHOUT EMOTION

• Emotion won’t get you where you need to go, and it won’t make traffic move any faster, but it can slow you down by making you sloppy.
• When you’re running late, stress can build, but there is no malice in the advance of time, just as there would be no ill-will in the crush of steel. These things are not your enemies. You cannot defeat them by hating them. Anger will not slow the passage of time or allow you to pass through solid objects, so keep your cool and your wits about you.

Eating Less Meat: It’s surprisingly easy to do.

Vegetables are delicious.  I bet it was the meat and dessert industry that started spreading the meme that kids had to eat their vegetables if they wanted dessert, as though it were a chore to eat vegetables.  And then kids started to believe it. 

After reading James McWilliams analysis of the rift between animal rights advocates and sustainable farming advocates on the subject of synthetic meat at the Atlantic, I thought I might write a bit of an update to the post I wrote way back in December about roughly the same subject. 

I concluded that post by confessing that I ate all the usual meats without much in the way of guilty feelings.  Since then I’ve pretty drastically reduced my meat intake.  My decision to change my diet was not based on animals’ capacity to think or suffer but because a little over two months ago a few friends of mine and I were discussing the carbon costs of our diets.  Heh… Just writing that makes me feel like such a caricature of a liberal yuppie.

But anyway, my friend was pointing to some research he had read about that suggested, persuasively to him, that given the carbon costs of industrial meat production, going vegetarian was one of the most effective ways for an individual to reduce his carbon footprint.  I don’t mean to evaluate that argument here, but you can read about it at New Scientist. 

Now, my friend is not a vegetarian, so it’s not like he was judging the rest of us, but partly because by this point in the evening we were already several beers in, I decided to call him on his mild hypocrisy.  I told him that if he went vegetarian, I would too, thus doubling the environmental impact of his dietary decision.

We made a few concessions on the spot to make the challenge realistic and decided it would last only 6 months (actually until November 5th, because it’s so easy to remember).  We were permitted fish for two meals a week, some other meat for one meal a week, but beef only once a month because it’s apparently the worst, environmentally speaking.  Other than that we would abide by a strict vegetarian (though not vegan…eggs and dairy are allowed) diet.

Since then, 2 months in, I’ve got to tell you, it has been surprisingly easy and I feel really healthy and good about it.  Here are some ways that my eating habits have changed (or not):

• I order vegetarian meals in restaurants (easy)
• I don’t eat fast food (a little tough at first, but there’s no way I’m wasting a precious beef credit on a Big Mac, now it’s easy)
• I never realized how many hoagies I ate.  On average, I probably ate between 2 and 3 hoagies a week before.  Now I eat more peanut butter sandwiches, potato chips and fruit.  (moderately hard)
• I eat tofu sometimes, like in a delicious stir-fry (easy)
• I’ve been a recipe experimenter for a long time now, and if anything, contrary to what you might think considering that a vegetarian diet only reduces the number of ingredients I have to work with, my diet has grown more interesting, because instead of getting stuck in the old beefporkchickenpastabeefporkchickenfish rut, I’m trying all sorts of new recipes.  (fun and easy)
• I’ve experienced no loss of energy; if anything, I feel less sluggish than I used to
• I save money, especially on lunches, which I can then spend on expensive steaks once a month

So anyway, so far so good.  There’ve been only four or five minor slip-ups so far between my friend and I, and already I think we’re having a positive impact on the environment.  Just kidding, but seriously, significantly reducing the amount of meat I eat has been surprisingly easy for me and it’s delicious. 

There’s still four months ago, but I have a feeling that the eating habits I’m developing now will extend beyond Guy Fawkes’ day.

BONUS: Make this.  It’s easy, customizable, and you will like it.

The Elephant-men of Avatar 2

Here were trunks, spines, tusks, fangs, claws, tails, paws.  Here was fur, and here was smooth hide.  Here was flesh flowing at will and seeking new shapes.  Here were dark chambers, lit only by flickering fungoid-glow, in which no firm distinction of species existed (Downward to the Earth 165).

Word on the street is that James Cameron won’t make a sequel to the award-winning 3D spectacular, Avatar, unless “he feels strongly that the script is excellent enough.”  Sufficient excellence is a funny sort of concept, and I’m not exactly sure what it means, but he could do a lot worse than to adapt Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth (1969). 

I had pretty serious reservations about Avatar before watching it.  I'd read that it was racist, that it staged the conquest of fantasy over sci-fi, that it worshipped a death-god (Douthat, you're awful, but sometimes hilariously so), and that like Titanic it will be unwatchable in 10 years. 

The consensus among friends of mine whose opinions I respected was that it was visually awesome.  Not worth thinking about, but worth watching.  Initially I resolved not to watch it at all.  Movies can be good and have awesome computer effects, I said to myself, so I’ll wait for them… 

But then I was kidnapped! by this team of insane scientists who were researching methods of coercion and torture.  Seriously!  It was frightening.  They took me to a secret underground laboratory and told me that they would electrocute one kitten for every hour that I resisted watching Avatar.  Innocent, defenseless kittens!  Now, I am a man of strong principles and iron will, but I am not a monster.  So reluctantly I agreed to watch it.  Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.   This really happened.  I wouldn’t have watched it otherwise.  My time is far too valuable.  Honest.

Well, turns out it sucked.  It totally sucked.  I wasn’t offended by the politics or anything.  The nature-worship was sort of cheesy, but the idea of a sentient biosphere was cool, and I’m positive that Cameron meant well.  But it was still 10 lbs of CGI in a 5 lbs bag.

However, Cameron could totally redeem himself in my eyes if he took a serious, long look at Downward to the Earth as possible source material for the sequel. 

Why, you ask? 

Downward to the Earth, as it happens, is a novel about redemption.  In the far future, Earth has established a far-reaching colonial empire spanning inhabited alien worlds.  Holman’s World (or Belzagor, as the natives call it) is one such planet.  But liberal activists on Earth stir up enough anti-colonial sentiment to successfully lobby for the relinquishment of all colonized planets hosting sentient life back into the possession of their indigenous populations.  The plot of the novel follows Edmund Gundersen, a former sector administrator of Belzagor, who returns once more to his outpost eight years after Relinquishment to atone for his past sins.

Strangely, there are not one but two sentient races on Belzagor, the Nildoror and the Sulidoror.  The Nildoror are massive, elephantlike beings, herbivorous and passive, whom the earthlings exploited as beasts of burden.  The omnivorous Sulidoror, on the other hand, are large, furry bipeds, about one and a half times the size of a man.  Throughout the many years of colonial occupation, the Sulidoror mainly kept to themselves in the mysterious forests of the northern mist country, but Gunderson is surprised, on his return, to find the Sulidoror living alongside of the Nildoror, even in the tropics where he had been stationed.

The Nildoror have this thing, like a religious rite, called Rebirth, that Gunderson has heard only whispers about.  They pilgrimage to the mountain of Rebirth, deep inside the mist country, to undergo it, and Gunderson, racked with guilt, has become obsessed with the idea of participating himself.  But on the way to the mountain, Gunderson comes in contact with one of his former colonist friends, a “dark and chilling saint” named Kurtz (an explicit reference to Heart of Darkness) who has already attempted Rebirth and came out of it writhing in pain, his body a deformed mess of alien biology equipped only for suffering.  “River…death…lost…horror…river…cave…warm…lost…warm…smash…black…go…god...horror…born…lost…born…” he feverishly repeats (116). 

Will Gunderson continue on his pilgrimage or turn in horror from this fleshy manifestation of the deep, twisted darkness he fears he and his kind have imposed upon the planet?  You’ll get no more spoilers from me, but at its core, Downward to the Earth is about the cruelty of Western civilization, the arrogance of the human race, the possibility of redemption and the virtue of estrangement (and maybe also the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs).  These themes match well the message of Avatar, but with an important difference: the natives of Belzagor have no use for human saviors. 

Cameron really wouldn’t have to change much.  Swap out the Sulidoror for the Na’vi and maybe instead of elephant-like aliens, he could have some Pandoran equivalent of the blue whale play the role of the planet’s secondary sentient race.  

The Dystopian Future of the Past is Now!

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time. (Times Online, 9/29/09)

Some Dutch scientists backed by a sausage manufacturer have grown "a soggy form of pork" in a petri dish.  Where to begin?

Leaving aside a mostly silly dislike I have for the Netherlands (Rembrandt and Van Gogh...Awesome; pirate capital of consumption and Infernal setting of Camus' The Fall...not awesome), I think this begins with Chicken Little.

In 1952, Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth wrote The Space Merchants, a novel I've been meaning to re-read.  It's sort of a satire of consumer-advertising culture, prescient in lots of ways, that follows Mitchell Courtenay, a future-day Don Draper, as he descends from the halls of Madison Avenue power to the dystopian subterranea of "Luna City" or something like that.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about the novel is when Mitch is escorted deep beneath a food-processing plant by a worker who is secretly also a member of the conservationist, dissident underground:

I asked about the apparently immense weight of the ceiling.  "Concrete and lead.  It shields cosmic rays.  Sometimes a Gallina goes cancer."  He spat.  "No good to eat for people.  You got to burn it all if you don't catch it real fast and--" He swung his glittering slicer in a screaming arc to show me what he meant by "catch."

He swung open a door.  "This is her nest," he said proudly.  I looked and gulped.

The "Gallina" (AKA Chicken Little) is a 100-ton mound of growing flesh, fed from nutrient tubes and pruned by Mexicans with light sabers for general consumption by the people of the moon.

Now Space Merchants is undoubtedly a more sophisticated satire than I recall, but I remember being repulsed by the very idea of Chicken Little when I was younger.  Some kind of blob of meat, fed with tubes and and prone to cancer?  So unnatural and alien, thought I.  But, to quote Augustine, such a fool I then was.

According to a PETA rep quoted in the article, "if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal, there's no ethical objection."  So for someone who likes the taste of meat but draws some sort of line between animative and vegatative souls, this laboratory pork potentially solves a lot of problems.

But in fact, I'm not entirely sure what line or lines I draw.  I eat most of the usual meats, generally without compunction.  (Although I have been staying away from shrimp for the last several months, purportedly in support of mangrove swamps, but also because my brother once referred to them as the cockroaches of the sea, which maybe means that my ethics are always really aesthetic judgments in disguise).  Occasionally I try to determine a line.  Would I eat a dolphin?  Blue whale?  Elephant? Monkey? Mountain gorilla?  What if s/he knows sign language?  What about a friend of mine who died in an accident?  If something wanted to eat me after I died, I don't think I would mind.  Either that or worms anyway.  Is there a cognitive/non-cognitive line I would draw if I could decide what cognition was?  

It's probably true that the more like a human being an organism is, the more distasteful would be the idea of me eating it, which isn't to say that there's anything natural about this distaste, but I wonder if whatever explains that distaste might also explain the uncanny valley?  On the other hand, I also don't want to eat a bowl of spiders.

Raskolnikov and Dexter, part 1

We're currently working our way through Crime and Punishment in one of the classes I'm teaching, and we spent almost the whole of the last class working through Raskolnikov's theory of the "extraordinary man."  In the fifth chapter of Part 3, smack dab in the middle of the book, Porfiry (the man investigating the pawnbroker’s murder) cunningly gets Raskolnikov talking about an article he had written as a student, in which he distinguishes between the common, obedient mass of humanity and "those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment."¹ 

The man with such a gift, argues Raskolnikov, is almost always judged a criminal by his contemporaries, though he “has a right...that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to...step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea--sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind--calls for it." ²

Sort of by surprise, I presented them with an overly-reductive summary of Alain Badiou’s little book on ethics.  For Badiou, we are not born “subjects.”  We are simply Homo sapiens, a species of animal, and animal behavior is amoral—it obeys certain “natural” laws but it would be inaccurate to describe any of their actions as good or evil; however, when an animal (not necessarily a human being) experiences  what Badiou terms a “truth-event,” it then becomes the subject of a truth, something more than animal. 

Now truths (and these are subjective “truths” we’re talking about) come in four different flavors for Badiou, which strikes me as a little arbitrary or Aristotelian or something, but those flavors are Art, Love, Politics, and Science.  Not every animal is going to become the subject of a truth, but you might have one that realizes that it is in love with someone else, or another that realizes that the earth revolves around the sun, or another yet to whom it occurs that the history of the world is the history of class struggle.

A truth-event speaks a new word and hands down a new law, and the subject of a truth, like Raskolnikov’s extraordinary man, must remain faithful to his or her truth—must fulfill his or her idea—or pretend it never happened…and this alone—infidelity to truth—is evil, for Badiou.  

So anyway, throughout this class, my brain kept echoing the phrase “an idea transcended into life” over and over again.  An idea transcended into life…where have I heard that?  I resisted the urge to say it out loud.  An idea transcended into life. Was it Nietzsche?  No, don’t be an idiot.  An idea transcended into life.  It’s related to what I’m talking about but why does my brain keep repeating it like that?

I soldiered on.  I answered their questions and corrected their misunderstandings.  One student seemed to find the claim that human beings are animals very insulting.  Another student jumped in and made my counter-argument for me.  And if I’m any judge, the class session turned out to be extremely productive as far as situating the novel in the proper philosophical context was concerned.  But it wasn’t until long after the class, on the bus ride home, that I remembered where I’d heard that line.

It was from Dexter.

Stay tuned for when I compare Dexter to Raskolnikov and explain why even though I’ve never really liked the ending of Crime and Punishment, I understand why it had to end the way it did, and why I think Dexter, despite how much I continue to enjoy watching it, may have jumped the shark.

¹ Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Vintage Classics. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.  p. 260.

² Ibid. p. 259